Having a subscription form on your company’s social media pages is one the most fundamental parts of building a large and relevant list of contacts.
With Facebook’s shift to its new “Timeline” style layout, however, the Static HTML application that makes it easy to build your own apps on the social site has changed:
Firstly, if you’re unfamiliar with Static HTML, it’s basically just a tool that provides an administrative structure for a custom Facebook application. By using it you don’t have to learn any programming skills to add subscription forms and other features.
If you haven’t worked with or installed it before, click here to add the Static HTML app to your page.
Next you need to choose the Page that you want to add this application to (if you have more than one).
After you’ve done this, the app will then be displayed with a star icon among any other apps you might already have, labeled as “Welcome”.
Click on the big star to access the app.
You will see a blank top box which is your canvass for entering whatever you want onto your iframes tab. Essentially, anything you enter into this area is your “application”.
So for example; this could be a form, some links, an image or even just some plain text.
The app supports HTML, CSS and Javascript languages. You don’t need to be a programmer, but it helps if you know some basic HTML to understand how to manipulate it if you want to make any tweaks.
All you need to do here is drop in the embed code for your subscription form (as explained in our previous post about letting people sign up via Facebook).
Click “save” on the top right hand corner, and the app will then appear on its own tab on your Facebook page.
(Note: You can also preview your app before you save it, to make sure you’ve entered the correct code and that it will display correctly).
Now that you’ve got your subscription form, it’s useful to do some editing on the iframes tab so that visitors will be able to identify it easier.
Backtrack to your Timeline and look at the Featured Apps area. The subscription form app should now appear in this list.
Click the Edit icon for this app and go to Edit Settings.
Edit the name of the app by calling it “Email Newsletter sign-up”, or anything that you think will appeal to someone viewing this page.
You can also upload an icon for your new app tab. When you’ve done that, click save and then click “Change” for “Custom Tab Image.”
And that’s all there is to it. Your custom subscription form will now display on your Facebook page in the app tab area with the title you have given it.
To finish things off, go back to this area again and click the Edit icon as you did before.
You can then change the order of your apps to place your subscription form in a better location - in case you already have a few other apps taking up the prime real-estate.
(Note: It’s unclear why, but keep in mind that Facebook is busy ironing out some of the bugs in its“Timeline” build, and that the iframes team is still catching up to the new environment; so the application may not be working properly for everyone quite yet.)
